Describing Ferrett

If you had to sum me up, a pretty good way of doing it would be, “He’s kind.  Not particularly nice.  But kind.”

First Night At The Dungeon

You can tell that my FetLife essays are extremely personal, because my marketing sucks.  Normally, Mondays are the big day for new posts, certainly weekdays – traffic’s dead on weekends.  And you especially don’t post an essay at 2:00 in the afternoon when no one’s reading, because the hits will be tragically low.
But I did promise to mention it here whenever I wrote an entry on Fet about my personal journey into alternative sexualities, and this one’s a fairly major one: an entry about my first public beating of a girl at the local BDSM club.  Which either sounds way kinkier than it actually was, or I’m just getting really too fucking jaded.
Anyway, the essay is called I Beat A Girl, And I Liked It, or: The TealDeer Experience Of A First-Timer.  You know where to find it.

In Which A Window Quietly Opens

In an argument over our heating bills, my wife inadvertently introduced me to a metaphor.
Which is to say that it was 74 degrees in the house at our most recent Rock Band party, and I wanted to turn on the AC.  Gini said this was bad for the AC, and berated me for my electricity-happy ways, and asked, “Why don’t we simply open the windows?”
So we did.  Both kitchen windows and the dining room window, flung open.  The party went well.  I forgot about our conversation entirely, perhaps due to the influence of four bottles of Yuengling.
Over the next two days, though, these weird noises intruded into my life, making the living room kind of creepy.  The trees made frighteningly loud noises, with leaves shushing and branches rattling.  There were sudden movements outside from animals.  Occasionally fragments of half-heard conversation would drift through the door.
I didn’t realize the windows were open, so it was almost like the house was haunted.  I didn’t like it.  Things were too busy, and I kept getting up to see what was wrong.
It wasn’t that these noises never existed – they did – but because I had the windows closed, I didn’t have to interact with the outside world.  When those windows were opened, suddenly all sorts of things I’d never noticed before were brushing up against my consciousness, and things felt wrong.  Scary.  Quietly out of place.
I think that’s not a bad metaphor for privilege.
Privilege has mutated into a term that’s used to silence and suppress more often than I’d like, but at its heart the idea is one that every human being in Western Civilization should keep in mind: you most likely have certain advantages that don’t even register as advantages for you because of your status/race/sex/sexuality.  (The classic is male privilege, which has a nice list compiled here, along with a link to several other privilege lists of mixed quality.)  The the way society quietly shunts those problems away from you are just transparent, like the air around you, not even seen as an advantage but just the way things are.
Then someone opens a window.
Once you’ve really started examining privilege, you start to hear all sorts of other noises seeping in.  It’s not as comfortable.  But it’s not as though those voices outside never existed; you just had a window shut so you didn’t have to hear them.  Now you do, and you have to deal with them.
It’s not a bad thing.  As long as you’re aware of the source of the noises, they’re not scary.  The world has not suddenly become a worse place.  You have simply become more aware of what’s going on, and now you get to deal with it a little more honestly.
And be a little more grateful for your house, and perhaps a little more willing to consider what it’s like for the people outside.

Weird Things About Writing

Accepting compliments on my work is, for me, the second hardest thing about being a writer – which is ironic, because I write to create an emotional reaction in people, then flip out whenever they have one.  But if you tell me that you like my work, I’ll just sort of stammer and say “thank you” and be grateful and then be utterly not sure what to say at all.
I try to thank everyone who leaves a kind comment in my story, but compliments are a very kind gift that I have trouble receiving.  So if you tell me you liked something of mine and I move to change the subject, it’s not you – I’m actually very flattered – but me.
Dysfunctional Ferrett is dysfunctional.
In other news, my Apple-invents-the-time-machine story iTime was given an inadvertent boost by Steve Jobs’ death – I’ve seen at least four links to it from people going, “Yeah, Steve’s dead, and here’s this cool story about a new Apple device!”  Which is a little odd, and ghoulish, but I guess it’s not like I planned it – and as Kaj Sotala noted, it’s also a clear reference to my essay on making money off of the recently deceased, “He’s Dead, Jim – Did We Stock Up In Time?”
Life is odd and messy.  I guess that’s why it’s so compelling, like a slot machine that never quite pays off but sometimes does.

Save Renee-Nicole Douceur!

If you remember my time writing Home on the Strange, then you doubtlessly remember my co-author Veronica Pare.  And right now, she’s trying to save  someone’s life:

Right now, Raytheon and the National Science Foundation are denying Renee – Nicole Douceur, the Winter Site Manager at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, life-saving medical treatment after a stroke she suffered last month. To avoid transporting her to an actual hospital, against theor own doctors orders, they have declared her stroke, a severe medical condition, not an emergency even though the lack of treatment endangers her vision, her mental capacity and her very life itself.

See what you can do to help (and spread the word) at SaveRenee.org.